This was written yesterday on September 11th, 2008. It is far too long for a blog post, but I thought some of you might find it interesting. It makes no mention of those killed on that day, it is about me and my experiences.
**************************************
Between December 1999 and January 2007 I lost all four of my grandparents, my uncle and my father, and I watched with my own eyes, live and in person, the twin towers burn. This means in just over 6 years, I lost 6 close family members and watched in horror as our nation was attacked in my hometown. And it wasn’t just my hometown, it was all of my hometowns: In September of 2001, by the time I was 25, I had lived in exactly three places (excluding summer camps): Western Pennsylvania, Northern Virginia/DC/Maryland and New York City. Lots of people make fun of how I “make everything about Jamie” but on September 11th, 2001, for a very brief moment, I really did feel like these attacks were an attack on me.
I remember that moment vividly; I can actually feel in my body all the feelings I felt then. I had returned to my apartment after my attempt to vote was aborted by the sight of smoke and debris coming from the towers only to hear that the pentagon had also been hit. I was lucky that my mom had called the apartment immediately upon hearing the news on The Today Show so I was able to speak to my parents before the lines got jammed – my brother had also gotten through to them, on the other line, while I was speaking with them, so my family knew I was ok and I knew they knew I was ok. I was reluctant to hang up with them, even though we didn’t have anything more to say, because I knew it would be hard to get through to them again. Eventually we said our goodbyes. A short while later the TV station SMS and I were watching announced:
“We have reports from KDKA in Pittsburgh, another plane….”
And I didn’t hear anything else…I shut down. I was shaking; my hands were out of control. Between sobs and gasping for breath I was demanding that SMS get my mother on the phone. He couldn’t.
Shortly thereafter we were able to discern that the plane that went down near Pittsburgh, was not actually that close to Pittsburgh at all. Eventually I did speak to my family again and the day continued to unfold. Looking back we now know that once the plane went down in Shanksville that the attacks were “over” but we didn’t know that then. Anything could have happened next. I remember at some point we heard that there were seven planes unaccounted for, I remember thinking all sorts of things. I also remember later that night that a sense of relief came over me when there were reports of a suspicious truck on the George Washington Bridge. “Okay,” I thought, “Here we go, the other shoe has dropped. It’s time for the land attacks.” It turned out that that truck was actually nothing, but I will never forget the sick feeling of calm I felt when I thought I knew what was coming next.
I have always felt frustrated by the fact that in telling one’s September 11th story you are, by definition, robbed of the true power of it. If I am here to tell the story, I didn’t perish. It is hard to hold in your mind, when hearing anyone’s story of that day, that living was not a foregone conclusion. We did not know we would survive.
On the first anniversary of September 11th, I went to work. I went to work, but I also went home early after a break-down in a colleague’s office. It was too much, too soon. We tried to be strong, but really we were all painfully uneasy. And for me it was something else. September 11th is the sobriety date of someone very close to me. He had been sober three years the day of the attacks and four years on the first anniversary. I was angry that a day that should be cause for celebration in his life, and mine, had been robbed of that joy. I was wrestling with how the private butts up against the public and I was losing.
I think of the losses in my life in the same way. It’s been seven years since the attacks and each year, in some way, the date is marked by society. It is talked about on TV and in the places I work. Op Eds are written, names of the fallen are read. And though it is not a national holiday (at least not one during which we are excused from school and work), it is forefront in the national psyche. That is not true for the other losses I have suffered in the past decade. The date of my father’s death, not even three years ago, means nothing to most people, though the feelings I have on the anniversary of that day are similar to the ones I have today. The personal and the private all always butting up against each other and it’s rarely pretty.
I didn’t go to work today because I could bare the duality of it: people would both be talking about September 11th and going on with their regular lives of mailings and meetings. I know that this is normal, even the way it “should be,” but I couldn’t be a party to it. I can’t go on with my normal life today and I can’t stomach how most people talk about it. It is hard to be so far from New York City today – people who weren’t there, or in DC, or in Western PA have their own valid response to the day, but it is not similar to those who were on the scene. On a macro level, yes, America was being attacked and we are all Americans; but on a micro-level, seeing things with your own eyes, smelling things with your own nose, hearing things with your own ears, touching things that were falling from the sky … I almost can’t go on. And yet, there are people I know who were in far more immediate danger than I, so I suppose everything exists on a continuum.
Last night, in two separate conversations, I confessed to my brother and to my husband that I think I may be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. They both responded with the exact same words: “I think we all are.” This self-diagnosis came to me earlier this week when the talk of how to commemorate September 11th came up in a meeting. At the mention of it, I (uncharacteristically) put my head down, stared at my notebook and hoped the conversation would wrap up quickly and not include anything that would offend me. This is not how I typically respond to a conversation about something that means a lot to me, but it was as if I were not in control, I just shut down.
But even though I am not at work today I am considering going to work on my father’s yahrtzeit (the anniversary of his death). This may seem counterintuitive given that my father’s death is more recent than September 11th and has had a far greater impact on my personal life, but really, that’s just the point. Somehow, the fact that the people I will be around won’t know that that day is any different than any other day may make it easier to go through the motions myself. But I am not sure.
I must end this post by admonishing myself … for I know better than to let life be defined by a series of tragedies. In the days between September 11th, 2001 and September 11th, 2002 I spent a lot of time thinking about sayings like “Now more than ever” which was all you ever heard around New York. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the idea that people were somehow supposed to be more “present” just because they had witnessed or experienced disaster. It felt too much like the idea of a death-bed confession which I am morally opposed to on principal: I think we are the sum of all of the moments in our lives, not just the ones when we think people are watching. It is that sentiment that prompted me to create The Before Project in 2002. It was an effort to create a forum that could help people remember what they thought was meaningful prior to the attacks. I am so glad I did it then, because I think I have lost sight of that now.
On second thought, maybe I haven’t lost sight of it, maybe I actually genuinely feel quite differently seven years later. Call it growth, call it perspective, I’m not sure, but I think I have a new understanding of what happens in these situations. It may seem obvious to those of you more evolved than I, but it is just coming to me now: a death-bed confession, a change of heart in the face of a life threatening diagnosis, “now more than ever:” the changes that these catastrophic events facilitate are not arbitrary shifts that should have or could have happened prior to these events, I understand now how they are tied to the new realities these events create.
No comments:
Post a Comment